Go On Living
by o-seastarved
Summary: The aftermath of Book 9. How does Sookie cope with what has happened to her and what does that mean for her and Eric? Oneshot.


She would never be the same again.

He had felt that in her, just as he had felt every moment of her pain – every jab, every slice, every bite – while he could do nothing. He blamed himself whenever he looked into her eyes and saw no more fire behind them. It was his fault; he should have rescued her like she had hoped and wished and prayed for. Instead he could only mend what was already broken. And how? By feeding her his dead blood. It could heal her body but it couldn't heal her already dead spirit. It had been murdered; her eyes were dull and gray.

Dead eyes to join the dead blood pumping through her veins. She'd had so much now, that without her usual spunk, her vivaciousness and fire, her humanity had waned. She was a drop dead gorgeous living dead doll. He could only bear one of them to be that; he needed one of them to be living, for her to go on living. But she didn't. Which was why he couldn't stand to be around her anymore.

But he had to. She knew this. He knew this.

He felt the sun on her face when she went outside, and he tasted the food she ate, all while she neither felt nor tasted any of it. They had reversed roles. He could feel her life even if she couldn't feel her own and he hated it. He hated her for that.

It was he now who found himself absent-mindedly driving to her house late at night. He wondered if all that was left in her was the bond, the blood. He would sit on the back steps of the porch all night. Never stirring, never knocking. All he did was feel her presence inside.

xxx

On one meaningless night, she opened the door. She glowed against the darkness, as he did. Her lips were thin and tight and her apathetic expression barely changed at all. She said nothing, but turned to reenter the house, an invitation for him to follow in tow. He latched the door quietly behind him and stood waiting.

"Blood?" she finally asked. Part of her breeding.

"Yes."

The fifteen seconds of air ventilation humming followed by the beep of the timer were excruciatingly long. And he was over a thousand years old.

They settled on opposite sides of the couch, and as she opened up a book to read, he sat immobile, the way vampires do. Every now and then he would reach for his bottle of True Blood from the coaster on the coffee table, take a quiet sip and set it back down again.

The silence was numbing. It was perfect.

"Better than my back porch?" she asked without looking up.

"Warmer."

"Like you notice."

"Not in that way."

Their voices barely reached an audible pitch, so as not to disturb the silence that was enveloping them.

After another ten minutes she said, "Might as well come in if this is going to be a regular thing." She sounded bored, aloof, distant.

"I don't have to."

She turned to him finally.

"You hate everything I've become, Eric. And I don't care about anything anymore. Well…" she paused. "…If that isn't marriage I don't know what is."

He would have smiled.

xxx

Sam threw silver around his neck once because she wouldn't see anyone but him. He accused Eric of isolating her from the people who loved her. He kept him tied up with the chains for five hours, probably hoping she'd have to come rescue him. But she didn't.

It was only fair.

And the sick irony of it was, that Bill was once again the knight in shining amour. He broke Sam's leg for good measure and burned his own fingers in releasing his Sheriff.

"You don't know how lucky you are," Eric told Sam, looking down at him with hot anger in his eyes. "Not seeing, being with someone who looks like Sookie and talks like Sookie. But she isn't Sookie."

"Because of you," Sam ground out from the gravel. Eric kicked him in the stomach before he left.

xxx

She was punishing him, Pam told him. It was the shrewdest form of torture she'd ever seen. Sookie was getting him back because she had no feelings or care except for the bond, which she used as a way to slowly kill him. It was genius and perhaps a little too much like Eric himself.

"Perhaps that's what you want."

"Shut up, Pam," he told her and left.

xxx

Another lonely winter night he found her doing yard work in nothing but her ripped denim shorts and a tank top. It must have been thirty degrees. He hated that she didn't feel the cold, that she did her work in the dead hours of the night.

Eric couldn't take it. He felt the cold nip at her ears and it made his teeth feel like ice. Before he knew it, his fangs were gleaming in the dark and he was behind her, grabbing her arms and turning her towards him, barely leaving any room between their bodies, holding her wrist at her side where she held her shovel. She'd use it to put a dent in his head if she could.

"You're cold," he said dryly.

"No I'm not," she replied.

At least she still had to breathe, and he could see it billow in his own face as she looked him square in the eye. He needed her humanity back. Later he would regret losing his cool, his composure. He'd sit in his office and replay his outpour of emotions in his head, punch his fist in to the wall. But he couldn't change the past. So he said it.

"You told me once not to ask you to define how you felt about me. You said you didn't want to know my answer in return. Naturally I thought that was wonderful, that you were a hell of a different woman, Sookie. Everything about you amazed me. But here's the thing. I loved you then. I don't know if I would have said it, but it was true and I don't lie to you, although I lie to myself. I loved you, I still do, and now you answer me, Sookie. Tell me."

She'd lowered her head. Her eyes were level with his broad, hard chest. She was breathing steadily, deliberately for a long while. They stood there like that for an eternity, in the night where only dead things mattered. After a while she lifted her chin. He half expected her lip to quiver.

"You want to know if I loved you before? Yes, Eric. I loved you. I loved you so much. And you know how I know? I know now I did because it's all gone now. I know what the bond feels like with nothing else mixed up with it. Because I don't love you anymore, I don't care about you anymore. I don't want you anymore. Funny isn't it? How I know how I felt only by losing it? So I know the difference."

Her lip never quivered.

xxx

When they had sex for the first time, as was inevitable, it was a hot summer night and again she'd been weeding in the yard. She'd grabbed his face hard with her dirt-covered hands and pulled him to her. She kissed him hard, rough and angrily and he didn't hesitate to react to her.

She hoisted her tiny frame up to him, wrapping her legs around his waist as her fingernails scratched at his perfect jaw. They were propelling backwards, against the wooden framing of the house. Eric set her down, feet in the soft summer dirt, only for a second to he could tug down her denim scraps she wore for shorts. Meanwhile she'd managed to rip his shirt in half, pushing it off his frame and exposing the pale chiseled flesh of his torso. And then that chest was flush against her again and he was finally pushing into her.

She didn't want to go slow, for him to be gentle with her, he could tell. So he obliged. Her face twisted in pain, like a new virgin, since it'd been so long and she'd had so many injuries. But with it, a rush of pleasure. A rush of life.

Against the old wood of her house, he brought her to life for a brief moment, an instant when he reached his fingers down between them and urged her, begged her to come for him.

"Please, Sookie."

And when it was over, she pulled her scraps of denim back on in utter silence, let the belt hang at her sides and began to walk back into the house.

"I want to tell you why I didn't come that night," Eric called quietly after her. She stalled in the doorframe, her face hidden from his suddenly sunken looking eyes.

"I already told you I don't care to know anymore, Eric."

xxx

They fucked infrequently but at her behest. They never spoke. Depending on her mood they either sat in silence on her couch or she'd jump him. He didn't care if it was right or wrong or for what reasons, except that it made her feel something.

Once, Bill smelled the evidence of their trysts and hit Eric, drawing blood from where his fang had extracted and cut his inner cheek.

"How dare you take advantage of Sookie like that," Bill growled. "After everything she has been through."

"Actually, Bill, I'd rather say she's the one who's been taking advantage of me," Eric said with his wry smirk.

Bill called him a selfish bastard. To which Eric replied by breaking three of his ribs. He sat in his office for the rest of the evening.

xxx

The night it happened was just like any other night. He would come to know that nothing particularly significant happened that day. It must have been the quiet, the months and months of circulation and drumming of her blood through her veins and in her heart. It built up and quietly appeared.

Eric showed up at her doorstep as he always did when the force pulled him there. She never came to the door, but he let himself in lately. Emptiness. Except for the faint noise of the running of the shower in her bedroom. He didn't have the decency or the patience to wait.

He thumbed the edge of the door, where the light shone through the crack that was left open. The curtain was pulled back, the shower running and Sookie lay naked in the tub, the lukewarm water streaming down her matted wet hair and spattering her body. She was shivering, holding her knees to her chest. And she was sobbing.

The running of the shower drowned out the noise of it, and the water mingled with the tears so she could hide from them.

Eric said nothing. He watched her until she turned her head to look at him, and the sight of her, deep into those eyes forced him to turn away and rest his forehead against the textured wallpaper of the bathroom wall just to keep himself composed. It was the same way she had looked at him at the hospital.

Her eyes were no longer dead.

He could feel the blood pooling behind his eyes but he fought it off, shut them hard.

"Eric," he heard her whisper, the quietest she'd ever uttered a word. And in an instant he was bending over and scooping her out of the tub, holding her limp body to him although he knew he couldn't warm it.

Like a porcelain doll he set her on her bed, drying her and tucking her under the sheets. When he tried to speak he was hoarse. It had been so quiet for them.

"Ask me to stay, Sookie." He kneeled beside the bed and his thumb traced the outside of her jaw.

"Do you have a choice?" she asked feebly.

"Maybe not. But choose to want me to stay."

"I don't love you."

"I know."

"What else is there, than the bond?"

"There's something."

"Ok." She gave a small nod. "Ok."

And so Eric crawled onto the bed beside her. He held her and she stiffened, then relaxed. He thought about how he loved her, and she didn't love him in return. How he did this to her, and how she now did this to him. He thought about his secrets, his thousands of years, his love and his loss, but most of all, the crack in her voice when she had begged him at the hospital.

_ "Where were you?...I hoped you would come, I prayed you would come, I thought over and over you might hear me. . . ."_

"_You're killing me," _he had said._ "You're killing me." _

"You're killing me," he whispered into her hair. But she was asleep already.


End file.
